Oracle Blog

The latest news directly from E-Business Suite Development

Wednesday Jan 27, 2010

[Editor: This is the fifth of a five-part series on virtualization
and cloud topics from Ivo Dujmovic, an architect in our Applications
Technology Integration group.]

Breaking news: you can now
achieve live migration of E-Business Suite instances on Oracle VM
(OVM). This is the High Availability and Fault Tolerance Holy Grail.
In an environment configured to support live migration, end-user
sessions running on one node in a virtual machine server can be
migrated transparently to a different node on a different virtual
machine server. You have asked for this functionality for more than a
dozen years and many Oracle partners offer solutions to achieve this.
After all these years, Oracle can provide you a solution for E-Business
Suite environments using Oracle VM.

Why was this so hard for
Oracle E-Business Suite? Well, the short answer is that we have
hundreds of products using many different technologies as part of the
E-Business Suite, and many of them had complicated session state
handling (some in the database, some on the middle-tier), caches that
needed to be kept synchronized, and so on. While all technical
problems are soluble, this one was just not feasible to solve within
E-Business Suite itself.

Virtualization Changes Things

In
an conventional (non-virtualized) architecture, the failure of a
specific application tier node would force a logout of all end-users
with sessions on that particular node. Any transactions that were
mid-stream on that application tier node would have been lost. On a
virtualized platform, end-user sessions can be migrated from one
machine to another without the end-user noticing.

OVM's live
migration feature has some requirements, including the need to have
look-alike machines on same subnet. These requirements are discussed
in detail in:

Oracle
VM also currently restarts the VM if the Virtual Machine Server fails,
which would mean the end-user session does need to be restarted. We
expect that these behaviors should improve over time.

In addition to the great live migration feature, OVM also has cloning functionality, which work seamlessly work if you use our EBS templates or virtualization kit.

Your Feedback is Welcome

This concludes my mini-series on virtualization and the E-Business Suite. We're
extremely interested in hearing about your use cases and your
experiences with our new templates and virtualization kit. Tell us
what you think via our new OVM Templates discussion forum.

Sunday Jan 17, 2010

[Editor: This is the fourth of a five-part series on virtualization and cloud topics from Ivo Dujmovic, an architect in our Applications Technology Integration group.]

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is the quintessential public cloud. Oracle has partnered extensively with Amazon Web Services (AWS), and in this article I hope to clarify were we currently stand with using E-Business Suite on Amazon EC2.

Public Clouds can introduce uncertified stack additions in the virtualization layer (hypervisor, provisioning tools). They also introduce a lack of control over physical hardware: neither the end-customer nor Oracle has control of the hardware or the virtualization stack below the OS. This is a new factor in the relationship between Oracle and its customers.

Amazon EC2 for non-production EBS environments

For the
time being, the novelty of public clouds and the currently-low number
of proof points means that we must initially take a prudent and
cautious strategy for using Amazon EC2 to host E-Business Suite
instances.

Since Amazon EC2 uses a virtualization engine that
is not supported by Oracle and has not been certified with E-Business
Suite, this environment is not supported for production usage of
E-Business Suite. Using Amazon EC2 for hosting E-Business Suite
instances may be suitable for non-production instances such as
demonstration instances, test environments, and development
environments.

For non-production instances, Oracle will provide
support for issues that reproduce on standard certified
configurations. Users will be directed to Amazon for any
virtualization-related issues.

Four Reasons to use Amazon EC2 Features for E-Business Suite environments

[Editor: This is the third of a five-part series on virtualization and cloud topics from Ivo Dujmovic, an architect in our Applications Technology Integration group.]

In my two previous articles, we announced the availability of our EBS Oracle VM (OVM) templates, and then announced the availability of the EBS Virtualization Kit. So now let's go through some highlights from my OOW'09 presentation:

This
answer uncovers my roots in software performance. Physical hardware
resources are frequently sized for -- and locked into -- a particular
configuration that might be sub-optimal for a project's overall
lifecycle. For example, during a single development cycle for a given
project, the project's environment can go through a number of stages:
preparation (patching, configuration, spot testing), broad testing (all
hands, RT tools, consultants), and wrap-up (trailing issue resolution,
spot testing). The project's hardware was sized to accommodate the
maximum load, despite the fact that the intensive testing period with a
hundred testers would last only a few weeks. In this case, the
hardware would lie mostly-unused for the majority of the environment's
life.

Another example is different environments being used in
different time zones. Physical-world time-slicing is hard, as it's hard
to capture all runtime components and their integrations' dependencies
on other servers. In the virtual world, shutdown, suspend, and startup
actions are much faster and cleaner.

Of course, home-grown tools
and manual optimization tries to compensate for some of this. And they
still fall short! In the virtual world, moving resources is faster and
easier. It will spoil you -- you will feel as if you have more
hardware. And your customers will feel spoiled once you can quickly
provision environments.

Q. What is a cloud?

A: Virtual resource swarm present on your network, on somebody else's, or on the internet

Well,
I did help with beekeeping a number of times, but that is not why I
chose the word swarm. I agree with Larry's view that we could have
used other words like net, grid, cluster or cloud. Even the word swarm
could be used, although it implies self-repairing, management, and
intelligence. I would argue that this is the direction we are
heading. But let me start with the basic properties people associate
with clouds:

Utility pricing: pay as you go, per usage vs. per user or per cpu

Self service provisioning: easy and fast to get a resource

Self-preservation of resources: the resource platform will worry about the little stuff like failover, system administration

Private clouds run on your own hardware, and public clouds run on someone else's hardware.

Today's
clouds are missing a lot of the "magic" features that one could dream
up, but cloud infrastructure providers are starting to work on those.
My favorite missing feature: integration automation and intelligence.
What good is a quickly-provisioned app if it is not integrated into the
right identity management, business intelligence, workflow, or portal
system?

So even short of the future features, private or public clouds provide effective provisioning and resource-management platforms.

Q. What Virtualization Platform should I choose for E-Business Suite?

A. Funny you should ask: Oracle VM.

Oracle
VM has been fully certified with EBS for 2 years. It's got a couple of
things going for it: it is free, it is certified and optimized for
Oracle products, and Oracle supports it. Here's the latest list of
certified EBS releases and platforms:

In addition to using our templates, customers might want to build their own templates. As most of you know, virtualization platforms like Oracle VM are just that -- platforms. They do not help you with anything inside the template, or if they do, it is a starting point template with OS e.g. OVM templates for Oracle Enterprise Linux, or a process/tool to create that OS starting point (JEOS = Just Enough Operating System, pronounce "juice").In any case, you proceed with your bare bones template to start a virtual machine (VM), mount your disk, install your E-Business Suite, and save your VM template. The end result is an image of machine with a set host name, IP, E-Business Suite instance. As long as it is self-contained, i.e. both your database and middle tiers are installed and you have no external integration, you are OK, right? It's not quite that simple, I'm afraid.

Multiple VMs May Have Naming and IP Collisions

If you
want to bring up a number of these VMs from the same template, they
will all think they are host x with IP y and EBS instance z. That might
cause some problems with your network, or at least for the browser
which needs to figure out how to connect to the right one of these
instances...

If you want to do external integrations, e.g. break
apart your EBS VM's into a database VM and middle tier VM, or add an
external identity management system, portal, business intelligence, or
whatever you fancy, well that is doable the first time for the first
VM. For the next VM of that template, it might appear like that
integration is already done. Hmmm....

When I brought down the
first VM, did I want to keep it and its integrations around, or not?
Is my middle tier X supposed to work only with one database VM Y or
some another database VM?

Initializing New Virtual Machines Upon First Startup

As
you can see, virtualization platforms only provided the magic to create
more "virtual" machines from one template. But you still need more
magic: for starters, you want the to tell the VM its name and IP to
initialize it when it boots from a template for the first time.
Luckily for both of us, the Oracle VM/Linux team supplies scripts for
this magic. Now, you realize that you really don't care about virtual
machines, but virtual E-Business Suite instances. You need more magic
to get the E-Business Suite instance to initialize on first boot.

We
have created this magic (OK, it's just a couple of scripts), for our
E-Business Suite templates, and are eager to share it with you via our
E-Business Suite Virtualization Kit. The Virtualization Kit consists of
documentation and scripts that help automate the desired behavior of
OVM templates with E-Business Suite:

Friday Dec 11, 2009

[Editor: This the the first of a five-part series from Ivo Dujmovic, an architect in our Applications Technology Integration group, on virtualization and cloud topics]

As you may have noticed, we have not yet done the recap of my OOW'09
E-Business Suite Virtualization Update presentation. The reason was
twofold: we wanted to create a blog mini-series, for which this is the
first article, and we wanted to publish that after we finished some
development work. So without any further ado...

We are pleased
to announce that Oracle VM templates for Oracle E-Business Suite
Release 12.1.1 are now available for download from Oracle E-Delivery. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions are available. This virtual
deployment package delivers a "quick start" for E-Business Suite 12.1.1
on Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.3.

Tuesday Aug 04, 2009

Our documentation about sharing filesystems between multiple Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 application servers recommends that you install the Instance Top (INST_TOP) on a local filesystem. This has prompted an
interesting discussion about whether this is really mandatory, or whether it's technically feasible to put the Instance Top on, say, a dedicated fibre-attached SAN.

Our guidance on the INST_TOP being installed on a local file system is based on three major considerations:

Separation of duties and security implications

Impact of SAN performance on Apache

Additional troubleshooting complexity

1. Separation of Duties & Security Implications

Our recommended configuration allows for different file system privileges and ownership between the Instance Top (INST_TOP) and the Code Top (ORACLE_HOMEs & APPL_TOP).
This allows for the segregation of duties between administrators for the respective servers.
Patching can be done on the Code Top by central system administrators who own the central shared portion of the file system. Instance Tops can be owned by instance sysadmins, who usually already own the CPU box with local storage.

Some instance-specific, run-time-generated files (e.g. reports, temp files) can include unencrypted data. Contrast those with database files (DBFs), which can be self-encrypted or contain encrypted data. Even with encrypted file system solution in place,
there is less depth in defenses around some of the INST_TOP files.

2. Impact of SAN Performance on Apache

Apache performance is highly sensitive to mutex file access latency, and at higher loads is also sensitive to I/Os per second. We tried using a central SAN for INST_TOPs in our internal EBS development environments but
found the performance to be unacceptable. However, not all SANs are created equal, and depending on the SAN, it might be good for even production use.

A very good article on this point is available from the SQLTeam web site:

A network storage access problem can have a spectrum of symptoms, including performance slow downs and even as intermittent end-user session failures. Some of the affected code paths were made more resilient over the years, but we still prefer to err on the
side of prudence and not potentially cause these (hard to diagnose) problems.

Your Mileage May Vary

All that said, you might decide that your testing of SAN performance demonstrates that its latency and I/O transaction throughput are good enough for your requirements.

Our Support and Development teams will attempt to reproduce any reported issues in a multinode environment where the INST_TOPs are stored on a local filesystem. If the issues are isolated to the external placement of
the Instance Tops, our recommendations would be to either revert back to local storage, or to work with your SAN vendor to optimize the SAN's performance.

[Editor's Note: Ivo Dujmovic leads the hard-working Applications Technology Integration development team responsible for the E-Business Suite's technology stack and configuration management tools, including AutoConfig and its associated templates. He's been providing deep technical guidance for this blog from the wings since its inception, so we're very lucky to have his direct contributions for this particular announcement. I'm skipping the customary introductory article for him in the interest of getting this article published quickly, but we'll get a proper public welcome out for him soon.]

The latest TXK Rollup Patch S (Patch 6372396) is now released and is generally available for download from Oracle Metalink. The official name for this patch is:

We know that part of the reason why our TXK RUPs enjoy such high adoption rates (thousands of downloads per quarter) is that they are self-contained. At this point in time, we have decided that taking up a wider set of well-adopted dependencies is a minimal price to pay for providing customers with all the latest technology configuration management functionality.

Please tell us if you find these additional requirements burdensome!

News: TXK RUP S conflicts with Oracle
Diagnostics, introducing bug:

7126196 IZU_TOP GONE/LOST
AFTER AUTOCONFIG UPGRADE

If you use Oracle Diagnostics, please apply the patch for bug 7126196.